concertina226 writes: Speaking at the Cloud Computing World forum in London today, JP Rangaswami said that cloud provides the scalability and flexibility that organisations need to survive in the modern age. However, organisations that choose to adopt private rather than public cloud will miss out on the benefits.

“Whenever anyone uses that phrase to you, just ask them who are you sharing costs with. If all the costs you’re sharing are just with you, you’re just kidding yourself, it ain’t a cloud” said Rangaswami.

“The only way it has value is if someone else is taking the risk, and you can step it up or down. This isn’t just a question of infrastructure; IT is not just about hardware. Your processes have to be able to scale, your ability to put things on and take things off has to be able to scale – everything you do has to be able to scale in both directions.”